The mood at Veloria had shifted from tension to near despair.
Late nights blurred into early mornings. Coffee cups piled up like trophies of exhaustion. Aruna, Reza, and Naya dragged themselves through each day with hollow eyes and heavy steps, the spark that once fueled their dream flickering dangerously low.
Giselle showed no signs of slowing down.
Every morning she arrived earlier than anyone else, heels clicking against the worn floor, laptop already open, demanding updates with a crisp efficiency that allowed no room for excuses.
"You think you're tired now?" Giselle said one evening, after a brutal four-hour strategy session. "This is nothing. This is where most people give up. But if you push through this, you'll be stronger than ninety percent of startups out there."
No one responded.
Aruna stared at her notes, her handwriting a chaotic mess of crossed-out ideas and abandoned strategies. She barely recognized the person she was becoming sharp-edged, short-tempered, brittle.
Reza leaned back in his chair, rubbing his temples. "There's a difference between being strong and being broken," he muttered under his breath.
Naya let out a shaky sigh, her fingers trembling as she tried to type up the new product plan Giselle had demanded yet another overhaul.
Days turned into a grinding, merciless routine.
Feedback sessions felt more like interrogations. Every misstep was dissected mercilessly. Every delay was treated like a betrayal.
The worst part was that Giselle wasn't wrong.
Underneath the harshness, her criticisms were sharp and painfully accurate. Their original platform was bloated. Their messaging was confused. Without her ruthless pruning, Veloria might have drifted into oblivion, one misguided ideal at a time.
But knowing that didn't make it any easier to endure.
One night, as the clock neared 2 a.m., Reza snapped.
"This isn't what we signed up for," he said, throwing his pen across the table. "We started Veloria because we believed in something. Now it's just... survival. Numbers. Deadlines."
Aruna looked up from her screen, her throat tightening. She had been thinking the same thing for days but hadn't dared to voice it.
Giselle, sitting at the head of the table, folded her arms calmly. "Belief without execution is just fantasy," she said. "Dreams don't pay salaries. Execution does."
Reza stood up, breathing hard. "At what cost, Giselle? We're burning out. We're miserable. You talk about survival—but if we lose ourselves, what's the point?"
For once, Giselle didn't fire back immediately. She studied them, her gaze unreadable.
"You want to change the world?" she said finally, her voice quieter but no less firm. "Then you have to survive long enough to do it."
Silence.
Aruna felt something break inside her a thin crack spidering across her stubborn idealism. Was this just the price of ambition? Had they been naive to think they could do it differently?
Maybe.
Maybe not.
The next morning, Giselle surprised them.
Instead of her usual barrage of demands, she called them into the conference room and, without preamble, dropped a list of contacts onto the table.
"These are people you need to meet," she said. "Potential partners. Advisors. Investors. I pulled some favors."
Aruna picked up the list, blinking at the names. They were impressive. People they had only dreamed of reaching out to. Gatekeepers to real opportunities.
Reza looked at Giselle warily. "Why are you doing this?"
Giselle allowed a small, almost imperceptible smile. "Because despite everything, you're worth investing in. You just need to toughen up."
It wasn't an apology. It wasn't even kindness in the traditional sense. But it was something. A tiny gesture of faith, wrapped in her usual brutal pragmatism.
And somehow, it mattered.
Over the next week, things started to shift slowly, painfully.
Aruna, Reza, and Naya rebuilt the platform from the ground up, stripping away the excess, sharpening the core experience. They began reaching out to the contacts Giselle had provided, setting up meetings that felt like distant beacons of hope.
The stress didn't disappear. If anything, it intensified.
But something else grew alongside it-grit.
Late one night, as they reviewed a final prototype version of the new Veloria platform, Aruna caught herself smiling for the first time in days.
It wasn't perfect. It wasn't finished. But it was real.
And maybe, just maybe, they could still save their dream.
Even if it had to be forged through fire.